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OpenDocument Foundation To Drop ODF
poet sends us to Computerworld for a story on the intention of the OpenDocument Foundation to drop support for Open Document Format, OASIS and ISO standards not withstanding, in favor of the Compound Documents Format being promoted by the W3C. The foundation's director of business affairs, Sam Hiser, dropped this bomb in a blog posting a couple of weeks ago. Hiser believes CDF has a better shot at compatibility with Microsoft's OOXML, and says that the foundation has been disappointed with the direction of ODF over the last year.
is it April 1st?
Is this posted on theonion?
is taco drunk in charge of a keyboard?
has darl got a new job?
How much has ballmer paid to give such a turnaround?
liqbase
This is why having "boards" and "foundations" and "working groups" equals death for free software. They get bogged down, undermined and subverted by politics and beaurocracy.
Read radical news here
As one of the founding members of the OpenDocument Fellowship http://opendocumentfellowship.com/ (although I no longer consider myself a member due to time constraints), I can say that in every effort made to get a real community going with ODF/OO.org there was always a pushback from Sun, and it's really sad to see. I don't think Sam is right that CDF is the answer, but I do think that his comments about Sun not caring about ODF are probably very true.
OpenDocument is an already vetted ISO format. Why should we return to the back of the line now? We have our format, it's approved, and has support in many applications. No need to start bickering between ourselves when we're already fighting a lot of the corporate proprietary software makers.
Jay | http://oldos.org
Citations, please. If you're going to lob grenades like this, you owe it to your readers to offer proof of these accusations. I'm not saying you're wrong — I can see some factions within Sun taking this approach — but it'd be nice if you offered some proof.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
> On the other hand, completely ignoring Microsoft formats isn't essentially suicide, it is suicide. Microsoft exists, and dominates the office application market, pretending it doesn't exist and that you can 'do your own thing' without taking it into account is utterly stupid.
Quick, somebody tell Linus and RMS that MS dominates the OS market as well and they really shouldn't try to roll their own.
That aside, I do understand where you're coming from. We do *lots* of document generation. I mean 100,000+ in a given week. We use XML/XSLT to target PDF, ODF, OOXML and what have you. OOXML is a *major* pain compared to ODF. While we did implement the necessary software to support OOXML due to market situation, I do hope that ODF displaces OOXML. If ODF attains more 'compatibility' with OOXML, what's the point? We have OOXML now. We don't need ODF to become OOXML. We need it to replace it. If ODF becomes the defacto standard by *becoming* OOXML, that'll be a sad day for us.
My GF sent me an email the other day with an attached word document with the tag that it was "amazing".
I tried to open it in OO on linux and got a blank screen.
So I boot to Windows and open it in Word
Seems that it is simply a Flash animation embedded in a Word document, which gives rise to two questions;
1) Why the hell would somebody embed a flash animation in a fricking word document?
2) Why in the name of all that is holy is Word even capable of rendering Flash?
It is no fricking wonder that the MS Windows+Office platform is such a successful malware attractant when all their apps are capable of doing completely inapproriate things with inappropiate data.
It beggars belief.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Yeah, totally totally true. Office 2007 makes no sense at all as a strategic move. It is totally different from what people are already able to use, even if it is somehow better (just seems overly simplified to me).
I wonder what the hell has been going on with Vista and Office 2007. Not that MS has ever been brilliant about these things, just the monopoly.
Microsoft is in the process of pulling off a in your face, quiet revolution.
A key element of both Vista and Office 2007 is the paradigm of moving the GUI away from sins of the past.
The first and biggest problem with old UI concepts was Menus. They were a fast solution to a big problem. Menus are by nature not a 'graphic' UI element, even though they are synonymous with GUIs today.
If you are using Menus, you are in effect having to memorize a list of commands, and their location. Memorizing lists of words is one of the things GUIs were supposed to remove, and failed.
(Look at the Help Search in Leopard, it is specifically designed to search for Menu Items in applications because even Apple understands Menus are still not the ideal GUI solution.)
Vista and Office 2007 (more noticeable on Office 2007) virtually removed all menus, with the exception of single list contextual menus, and they will be replaced at some point as well.
Microsoft is 'slowly' using their UI research to bring new GUI concepts that are long overdue to the Graphic environment.
What the non-Microsoft world seems to overlook is how far they will take this, and how MS could leapfrog both Apple and the current OSS world if people stop paying attention or discount what Microsoft is doing. This is how it is a 'quiet' revolution, as most people don't get the 'bigger picture' of what Microsoft is slowly moving towards.
If you take Office 2007, Vista, and especially the framework constructs of WPF/Silverlight, notice where they are heading, as the WPF aspects are designed specifically for implementing new UI concepts in new ways. Microsoft plans on bringing the results of their GUI research this to their customers now that they have the frameworks/platform to do it.
So the next time you read an article by a 'tech' person giving Office 2007 or Vista bad marks for something like 'removing' UI Menus, realize the 'tech' person doesn't get it and MS is pulling one over on them even.